Portable Theatre Company was a writer-led company that toured alternative arts venues in the UK between 1968 -1973. Their aim was to present original and provocative new writing that challenged the staid mediocrity of mainstream theatre.
A portable theatre Tony Bicât and David Hare formed Portable Theatre in 1968, a year that saw widespread political unrest in Britain (and internationally) and where a youth orientated ‘counter culture’ flourished and was seen to challenge the existing order. The Drury Lane Arts Lab, set up by Jim Haynes the previous year, was an important venue for newly founded ‘alternative’ or ‘underground’ theatre companies.For example The People Show; Pip Simmons Theatre Group and Wherehouse La Mama / Freehold all used the Arts Lab as their main London base in 1968 Haynes offered free rehearsal space for companies on the condition that they performed in the Arts Lab theatre. Prior to ‘Portable’ Bicât and Hare had staged an adaption of Kafka’s The Trial whilst students at Cambridge University Bicat, Tony ' Portable Theatre: Fine Detail, Rough Theatre - a Personal Memoir' in Boon, Richard (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to David Hare Cambridge, 2007 and now through Haynes’s encouragement they developed a theatre piece intercutting Kafka’s diaries with selected other writings that became Inside Out .Inside Out opened at the Arts Lab 29 October . The Stage Thursday 7 November 1968 The actors were recruited from Arts Lab regularsMaurice Colbourne, for example, performed with The Pip Simmons Theatre Group and Freehold at the Arts Lab around the same time that he was in Inside Out and this was to be a touring company, hence, ‘portable’ theatre. '[They] work in basic outfits and with no setting other than chairs but, notwithstanding this, they manage to create and sustain a powerful, audience holding piece.' The Stage Thursday 7 November 1968
On the road with Kafka and Genet Augusta Hope, their administrator, was successful at getting sponsorship – an electric typewriter from Olympia and a heavily subsidised VW van from Volkswagen. With a slight rejigging of the cast in January, Inside Out set off on road – performing at universities, colleges, arts labs and arts centres – travelling more than fifteen hundred miles in their first yearHare, David The Blue Touch Paper, London,2015 p.? As a writer-led company they were in a stronger position to receive Arts Council subsidy than actor-led experimental companies. Inside Out received a ‘new writing’ grant and their policy of taking theatre to non-tradition venues and audiences would continue to make them successful in getting further grants.
David Hare's first play How Brophy Made Good was directed by Tony Bicât and it joined their repertoire.Hare wrote Brophy in ‘a ridiculous 96-hour dash that you couldn’t even dignify what I did with the name of a process’ when a commissioned work failed to materialise. (David Hare, 2015 Brophy is an apolitical television ‘personality’ whose career and demise is charted and interrogated by three idealistic friends.How Brophy Made Good played Oval House, London on 6 March 1969. The Drury Lane Arts Lab was in demise and Oval House had replaced it as the centre for London fringe theatre The Stage newspaper commented: ‘despite a muddle of Socialist politics,[it] is a surprisingly vital and impressive work’ The Stage Thursday 13 March 1969 Hare and Bicât had met Snoo Wilson at UEApresumably whilst on tour? and when he graduated in the summer, he joined them in a general production capacity for their second season.The Stage 22 May 1969 Jean Genet’s The Maids Genet drew the plot of The Maids from a 1933 tabloid murder: Christine and Léa Papin, maids in Le Mans, killed their mistress and her daughter. The use of lurid tabloid source material can be seen in later Portable plays such as Lay By was presented in drag on a double bill with Purity – a study in censorship by David Mowat .Thanet Times 23 September 1969 A new work commissioned from Howard Brenton was to join it on tour in the autumn.
Christie in Love Brenton was a friend from Cambridge and had been a resident writer with the Brighton Combination in 1968The theatre company, Brighton Combination, was established in 1967 and in 1968 was based in a small theatre / restaurant and arts centre of the same name in West Street, Brighton ref. The Stage 9 May 1968 and The Stage 3 Jan 1974 and now had a new play opening at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs - Revenge - a ‘satirical melodrama’ about the relationship between criminals and the police and society.Revenge opened at the Theatre Upstairs 2 Nov 1969 Brenton’s play for Portable was Christie In Love and it was toured from November Birmingham Arts Lab performance reviewed in Birmingham Daily Post 10 November 1969 prior to being brought to Oval House. Hare directed Christie in Love and explains the way commissioned material was developed to meet the company’s needs: ‘we started to shape plays deliberately to be portable – a kind of resilient drama you could throw on in a church hall. And they became more direct. The best of them is Howard Brenton’s Christie in Love, which is written specially to be thrown into places and just grab people by the throats at once’.David Hare interview by Ronald Hayman 22 May 1971 The Times p.19 The mild mannered serial killer, John Christie was played by William Hoyland in a naturalistic style whilst the interrogating police were grotesque caricatures – this mix of styles became a hallmark of Portable. Snoo Wilson was credited with the design – a pit of screwed up newspapers. Christie in Love’s popularity led to two revivals in 1970A Brenton / Halliwell double bill at the Theatre Upstairs in March 1970 and at the Come Together Festival at the Royal Court in October 1970 and significantly clarified for Hare and Bicât the direction the company should take: ‘from now on, there was no question of Portable doing old plays’ Hare, David Blue Touch Paper: A Memoir London, 2015
Shaking the audience Whilst Hare’s claim about not doing old plays isn’t entirely accurate - there was a Snoo Wilson adaption of Pericles (Pericles, the Mean Knight) in February and Strindberg's The Creditors in June 27 February 1970 Liverpool Echo and Friday 26 June 1970 Marylebone Mercury - Portable were gaining public attention and had developed a powerful house style with new work. Hare: ‘[Portable] expressed what the four of usBicât, Hare, Wilson and Brenton were thinking at the time and what we had to say about the world.’ The Times 22 May 1971 p.19 Hare explained the shortcomings of ‘mainstream’ theatre: ‘We felt that plays about psychology were simply irrelevant to what we took to be our country's terminal decline.’Gaston, Georg ‘Interview: David Hare’ Theatre Journal vol. 45, no. 2, May 1993 pp. 213–225 The lifting of theatre censorship in 1968 had provided the Portable writers with the opportunity to challenge dominant ideas including those of what constituted ‘good taste’, hence Bicât’s comment: ‘…We wanted our work to shock. Plays…were designed to shake the audience and therefore the establishment. ’ Bicat, Tony, 2007 Howard Brenton’s Fruit, directed by Hare, opened at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.The Stage 13 August 1970 Fruit at the Traverse Theatre Brenton explained how he was ‘influenced by some French Situationist texts…In Fruit a man, for reasons of personal revenge and cynism, tries to bring down the Government – by blackmailing the Prime Minister, threatening to expose the MP’s homosexuality’ but when the blackmailer is beaten by the system he turns to working class revolution and violence.Ansorge, Peter ‘Portable playwrights Plays and Players February 1972 p.16 Theatre critic Michael Billington felt that it was a short-coming of Brenton’s play that ‘all politicians and power seekers [are shown] as irredeemably corrupt’ and the work endorsed ‘the climactic gesture of a revolutionary warehouseman who flings a home-made bomb against a wall to symbolise his contempt for authority.’ Billington, Michael 'Fruit: a review' The Times 30 Sept. 1970 Fruit was in repertory that autumn with a new play by David Hare, What Happened to Blake? Described in the Kensington Post as ‘a brilliant, off-beat play …. that is every bit as eccentric, brilliant and unpredictable as [William] Blake …his weird and sometimes hilarious life is acted out by four great writers: Jane Austen; T. S. Eliot; William Wordsworth and Alexander Pope'. It was directed by Tony Bicât .Kensington Post 9 October 1970
Sheer exhaustion By the end of this tour the sheer exhaustion of life on the road was getting to Hare and Bicât: "we were doing the laundry, we were doing the lights, we were buying the props, we were driving the van, we were organising the meals and we were just about going out of our minds after five months of this.David Hare interview by Ronald Hayman 22 May 1971 The Times p.19 Hare and Bicât were developing projects outside of Portable Hare became writer in residence at the Royal Court in August 1970. His play Slag that had opened at the Hampstead Theatre in 1970 and was revived in the main house of the Royal Court Theatre 3 June 1971. Tony Bicât started developing a film project with Howard Benton this became Skinflicker and Snoo Wilson was now taking on a major role, usually directing his own work. Alongside Pericles, the Mean Knight was a ‘comedy’ set in a post-nuclear war Britain - Device of Angels The Stage 30 April 1970 Traverse, Edinburgh and in February 1971 Pignight touredWest Lothian Courier 19 February 1971 advert for 22 Feb 1971 Bathgate Community Centre prior to a London run at the Young Vic.The Stage 11 March 1971 Pignight at the Young Vic, written and directed by Snoo Wilson The critic, Dusty Hughes notes that Wilson ‘used fiercely imagined characters in comic and often savage works’ and summarised Pignight’s plot: ‘a paranoid East End gangster and his prostitute girlfriend are sent to guard a battery pig farm inhabited by the ghosts of its former tenants, and are visited, with fatal consequences, by a German prisoner of war/farm worker who has escaped from a local asylum’.Hughes, Dusty ‘Snoo Wilson obituary’ The Guardian 5 Jul 2013
A new artistic director In 1971, Portable were awarded an £8000 subsidy from the Arts Council. Although ‘they could now afford to pay themselves to run the company’ neither Bicât nor Hare wanted that jobBicat, Tony etc and rather than giving the money back they appointed Malcolm Griffiths to become the company’s artistic director.The Stage, 22 April 1971 Bicât and Hare also knew Griffiths from Cambridge. He had then worked for four years in repertory theatre where he had become disillusioned by what he saw as their ‘reactionary’ programming '.... I told them exactly what I thought’.Ansorge, Peter, p.20 He began his season with Portable in April directing two new John Grillo plays, Zonk and Food at Edinburgh, London, Nottingham, the Midlands, Yorkshire, the South West and East Anglia.
Collaborative writing Although in May 1971 Hare said that ‘he no longer has anything to do with Portable Theatre’